Information and ruminations on the business of healthcare from veteran healthcare journalists.

Montefiore SDOH Screenings Leverage Learnings from Existing Pilots

Thursday, August 3rd, 2017
This post was written by Patricia Donovan

Montefiore Health Systems screens patients for social determinants of health, which drive 85 percent of a person’s well-being.

Montefiore Health System’s two-tiered assessment screening program to measure social determinants of health (SDOH) positivity in its predominantly high-risk, government-insured population is inspired by existing initiatives within its own organization. Here, Amanda Parsons, MD, MBA, vice president of community and population health at Montefiore Health System, describes the planning that preceded Montefiore’s SDOH screening rollout.

I’d like to explain how we came to implement the social determinants of health screening. Many of us in New York State participate in the delivery system or full-on incentive program. It is that program that has enabled us to step back and think about using Medicaid waiver dollars to invest in the things that make a difference.

I need not tell anybody in this industry: many studies have looked at what contributes to health. We know that clinical health in and of itself contributes somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of a person’s well-being; however, so much more of their health and well-being is driven by other factors, like their environment and patient behaviors. And yet, we had not had a chance in the healthcare system to really think about what we wanted to do about that. It was really the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program that has allowed us to start exploring these new areas and think about how we want to collectively address them in our practices.

The way we structured our program was quite simple. We said, “If we’re going to do something about social determinants of health, let’s recognize that they are important and must be addressed, and that we have many different community-based organizations that surround or are embedded in our community that stand poised and ready to help our patients. We’re just not doing a very good job of connecting them to those organizations, so let’s backtrack and say, ‘First, we have to screen our patients using a validated survey instrument.’”

There were different sites at Montefiore that had already launched various pilots. We said, “Let’s make sure we leverage the experience and the learnings from these pilots. Then let’s think about who’s going to deal with those patients, which means we have to triage them.” For example, if somebody screens positive for domestic violence that is occurring in their home right now in the presence of children, that might require a different response from us than someone who says, “I have some difficulty paying my utilities.”

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